Development economics nowadays is mainstream economics applied to poor countries. An examination of the core principles of mainstream economics reveals tremendous strengths, but also tremendous weaknesses. Other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology and political science, have...

In his Presidential Address to the European Economic Association, Tony Atkinson introduced the idea of a “Charitable Conservatism” position in public policy, which “exhibits a degree of concern for the poor, but this is the limit of the redistributional concern and there is indifference...

Globalization and Economic Reform have enormous potential for economic growth and poverty reduction. But there are at least three troubling features of these phenomena that have emerged over the last two decades—technical change which is biased in favor of capital and skilled labor; increased...

Crises are likely to be new normal for developing and transition economies. In designing programs to protect the poor against crises, governments face two uncertainties— uncertainty of crisis type and uncertainty of crisis timing. In the face of these uncertainties, I propose three lines of...

Minimum wage legislation is central in South African policy discourse, with both strong support and strong opposition. The validity of either position depends, however, on the effectiveness of minimum wage enforcement. Using detailed matching of occupational, sectoral and locational codes in the...

This is the Introduction to an edited volume of papers, from the Cornell-LSE-WIDER conference on Spatial Inequality and Development. The conference is part of a larger WIDER project on Spatial Disparities in Human Development.

The interplay between cross-border externalities, international public goods and development assistance, and the relationship between this interplay and the conventional rationales for development assistance, will be a key problematic facing aid agencies in the next decade. This note sets out a...